“For too long health and safety has been used as a convenient excuse to hide behind”

When the Prime Minister announced the appointment of Lord Young to conduct a review of health and safety and to find ways to tackle compensation culture, I welcomed it on behalf of HSE as a great opportunity to highlight the gulf between the many myths about health and safety and the reality of preventing people being killed and injured by work activities.

The resulting report has made the most of that opportunity and contains a number of recommendations for us in HSE to deliver as part of a broader approach to tackling the issues Lord Young has identified Nobody knows better than HSE the variety and volume of health and safety myths and nonsense out there. We’ve seen it all, from a supposed ban on toothpicks to health and safety legislation apparently preventing children from apple bobbing.

It’s been clear to us that for quite some time now that health and safety is being used by too many people as a convenient excuse to hide behind. Time and time again it is invoked to disguise the real motives for things not happening; concerns over costs or complexity, an unwillingness to defend an unpopular decision or simple laziness.

Our myth of the month pages have been challenging some of the worst ‘elf and safety’ stories over the last two or three years and have been widely quoted in many places. Our hope now is that Lord Young’s proposals will mark the beginning of the end for health and safety being used as a convenient excuse and a scapegoat.

HSE has already worked with others, to develop responses to two of Lord Young’s recommendations by creating a 20-minute risk assessment for offices, available online now, and an Occupational Safety Consultants Register, to be launched in January 2011. Many people assume risks assessments need to be long, formal documents covering every hazard, no matter how minor or unlikely they are to occur. Risk assessments are intended to ensure work is done safely and the new 20-minute online tool makes it clear it can be done for any office quickly and easily. It prompts employers to answer questions about their workplace to help them consider hazards, and then generates a simple but unique risk assessment with some possible follow up actions. Other web tools for similarly low-risk workplaces are also being developed.

Lord Young also identified that businesses find it difficult to know where to go to get safety advice which is both proportionate and reliable and HSE has been working with professional bodies representing safety consultants across Britain to develop the Occupational Safety Consultants Register (OSCR). It will allow employers to be confident that the safety consultants they use provide advice that is sensible and proportionate. Employers will be able to visit a single website to find local advisers with experience relevant to their sector Registration will demonstrate that consultants have a commitment to continuous professional development, a degreeequivalent qualification, two years’ experience, professional indemnity insurance and are bound by a code of conduct to only providing sensible and proportionate advice. To join the register, consultants will need to be Chartered members of IOSH, CIEH, or REHIS or a Fellow of the IIRSM. Membership of OSCR will be voluntary and the scheme will be managed by the professional bodies themselves through a not-for-profit company.

HSE remains committed to supporting organisations, whatever their size and business, in taking a sensible and proportionate approach to health and safety for the benefit of their workers and the bottom line. Lord Young’s report has been really helpful in identifying where action needs to be taken and in further drawing the distinction between the real health and safety agenda and the “jobsworths” culture. The 20-minute risk assessment for offices is available at www.hse.gov.uk/risk/office